


Cassie Maddox & The Three Sinners

by Ashling



Category: Dublin Murders (TV)
Genre: /steals from The Likeness and puts a twist on it/ thanks! mine now!, Background Vincent Johnstone/Cassie Maddox, Bruises, F/M, Id Fic, Id Pro Quo 2020, Mentor/Protégé, Pre-Canon, Undercover, Undercover Cassie Maddox, professionalism? this ain't it, you want id? OH I'LL GIVE YOU SOME ID
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:01:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23895022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: Cassie: Frank, I haven't been Lexie since this happened. And I nearly died, remember?Frank: Yeah, but you didn't, and being stabbed doesn't make you special. Everyone's been stabbed. I mean, I nearly got gelded. I've a hole in my thigh you can put your thumb in. Do you want to see?Cassie: I've seen it, and it wasn't that much of a treat.Working with Frank is an education.
Relationships: Frank Mackey/Cassie Maddox
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: Id Pro Quo 2020





	Cassie Maddox & The Three Sinners

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plutonianshores](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutonianshores/gifts).



As Cassie entered Frank’s office, she thought, not for the first time, that it looked like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, windowless and strange, painted a rich dark green even on the ceiling, one wall plastered with notes and pictures and surveillance stills. Then Cassie thought, for the first time: _home._ A settling in her chest. But that made no sense—what kind of home smelled faintly of stale biscuits and gunpowder, sulfurous? Wasn't that supposed to be hell?

The devil was there, anyway, with an oversized green jumper hanging from his wiry frame and the usual grin on his face. He had slipped in right behind her, carrying three coffees in a cardboard holder in his left hand and an enormous bundle of paperwork in his right. His eyes were bright. Cassie knew this even without looking, the way she knew her own eyes were bright: they were so alive, she felt herself suppressing a smile. It was thee crisp winter wind that had lit them up on their separate walks to their shared destination, and it was the case, the hall of doors swinging open so easy at the first lockpick he put in her hand.

All it had taken was a bit of fiddling on the part of Frank’s mate at Trinity, and Cassie had landed the right roommate, a frizzy-haired trust fund baby and drug enthusiast named Tilly. Tilly had taken a shine to her and taken her to the right parties, where she met the right people and eventually fell into the right job. She slipped into Lexie, or Lexie slipped into her. Every last part of Lexie was so well-designed for the occasion that even during conversations so knife-edged she could feel herself sweating through her thin floral print dress, she still felt occasional childlike flashes of disbelief: _am I really getting away with this?_ On top of having firmly established herself as a low-level university dealer in Johnstone’s network, she had a budding friendship with one of Fran’s girlfriends, regularly bumped into thee Darragh boys when she went out dancing on the weekends, and caught the eye of Vincent Johnstone himself.

Whenever she came back to Frank, Cassie felt like she’d was pouring out handfuls of stolen jewels onto his desk for inspection and seeing them glint in his eyes— _do you think she knows who killed Loughman? no, but if she did, I could find out, and it’s definitely not Peter_ —so proud that she matched him grin for grin, wide and shining. Lexie stole the information, lightfingered as a safecracker; Cassie took it all apart and put it back together, deft as a gunsmith. For once, they worked in perfect tandem, and they were fucking _killing_ it.

And Frank? Frank, the man, the myth, the bastard; Frank about whom every garda had an adamant opinion, no two alike; Frank who used up his three serious undercover missions on arms dealers, the IRA, and some third mystery that nobody was quite sure about; Frank who had reportedly been tortured with an electrical cattle prod and kept it together so well that his cover had remained unbroken and he stayed deep undercover for a full month afterwards; that Frank? He was one of a handful of men alive that she couldn’t wrap around her little finger if she gave it her best effort. And he had chosen her.

Cassie would always remember her high, nervous energy in that moment. How acutely aware she was of all the other Templemore graduates ready to walk right through that door and take her place the second Frank told her to go. As he ran her through the preliminary questions, her mouth had gone dry. To compensate, she had stared at him a little too hard, with an affect so proper and self-contained that it was almost prim, and she had kept her chin up a fraction too high in an attempt to cover up how badly she wanted the job. Probably Frank caught that. It was not her best performance. Afterwards, she would never be able to remember exactly what questions he had asked her. But at the end of it, he had smiled, a very specific Frank Mackey smile that she’d know well in the coming months, and she was in.

Because he had chosen her, any success she had was vindication for both of them, but sometimes, she could see something beyond mere pride in his dark eyes: recognition. They would review the recording of what she had said to Johnstone that day, or she would make an observation about some detail of his complicated social circle, or she would toss out a recon suggestion that could be reasonably deprecated as reckless, and Frank would smile that smile almost despite himself, smothered surprise: _fuck,_ _you understand._

So when Cassie declined all the carefully-planned exit strategies in favor of fucking Vince Johnstone like he was the last man on Earth, she wasn't at all surprised that Frank literally patted her on the back for it, like this was the rugby and she’d just scored a try. (And okay, maybe this _was_ like that, for people like them.) She figured it was business as usual: even if he didn't say it outright, he had likely done the same thing when he was undercover, and he was delighted to find someone as blithely gone in the head as he was. That was all classic Frank. Sometimes he was great fun and sometimes he was an intolerable little pain in the arse, but she had had a good day, so she took him as more the former than the latter, this time. She was bringing in another haul, and she was pretty sure one of her jewels was a diamond. 

As soon as the door closed behind them, they fell neatly into their usual pattern like a couple come home from grocery shopping: Cassie locked the door and sat down on an ugly brown folding chair, Frank dumped all his stuff on the desk, and they both settled in for the debrief. 

Cassie took her cup of coffee from the table and sipped slowly, enjoying the warmth, but Frank didn't touch either of his cups. She didn't expect him to. He liked to pace when he was brainstorming hard, and when he had that level of anticipation keeping him on his feet, he didn't need coffee.

"Not going so well with your man Vince, is it?" he said, tapping the wall next to the photo of Johnstone, smoldering out from a photo all square-jawed and sullen. He pitched his voice up ridiculously high. "So when do I get to see you again?" Pitched his voice as low as it would go. "Things are up in the air right now, sweetheart. I don't know." High again. "Should I call you?" Low. "No, I'll call you." Returned to himself. "Seems like he's losing interest. Was that what you were aiming for?" 

Cassie lifted her eyebrows. "You memorized it? Sounds like somebody's been listening to my sex tape on repeat."

If Cassie could seduce her way into the man’s house and bug it, that would be worth more intel than her previous three months of work put together. She was pretty sure that Frank refrained from pointing this out, not due to a morally sound desire not to pressure her, but because it was so obvious that saying it out loud would be a waste of time. He knew Cassie wanted the catch as badly as he did.

All he said was, "Could you not win him back? Add to your repertoire, or something?" 

"'Add to your repertoire.' Are you going to give me an instructive demonstration on the joys of anal, Frank?"

"Well, since you brought it up." He gave that grin a moment only, and then he blinked. Hardly a muscle moved otherwise—his mouth was still shaped like a smile—but jokes were over. "I assume you have something?"

"Course I do." 

"I'm all ears, babe. Black widow me up." He leaned against a corkboard and folded his arms with an expectant air.

Cassie chose one of his smiles to wear, a little smug underneath a lot of challenge, and took off her jacket. Then she unwound her thick blue scarf, leaned back, and gave him the full view. Four finger-marks on the left side of her neck, ripened into red streaks with a purple tinge, and then one dot of a thumb-mark on the right side of her neck to match.

Suddenly he pushed off the wall. Three quick steps and he was down on one knee beside her, two fingers under the tip of her chin. He smelled like smoke. The touch was gentle; the look in his eyes was not. It burned, and Cassie wanted to hit him. He was too close, close in a way he hadn't ever been before, even when they'd brushed up against each other in passing, like his body suddenly held more gravity than it deserved. Absurdly, she wished he'd either get closer or fuck off; there was something about this closeness that felt untenable, unbearable. He still hadn’t looked her in the eyes. He still didn't understand. _Come on—_

"Cass," he said, low and even, fraught, "There’s a line—"

She reacted like she'd been slapped. "Fuck off, Frank, I've heard that speech already." 

Her explosion got the desired result: he looked her in the eyes. Cassie, nearly vibrating with clean frustration, seemed as far as possible from traumatized as anyone could, and she knew it. 

Frank’s hand dropped and his own eyes cleared, but he stayed squatting there, and he didn't return to the rhythm Cassie expected. Where there should have been a spark of recognition followed by quick bright slices of words between them, hypotheses confirmed and strategies outlined and weapons chosen, instead there was only, flatly, “You did this?”

"How is that a question?" Cassie snapped. "If I'd been fighting, you would've heard it."

Maybe it was only an effect of the shitty overhead lighting, but Frank's eyes looked depthless. "Sometimes,” he said, and his voice was measured, “undercovers take off their mic, or unplug it from the battery pack. Sometimes they don't want to be heard. For a variety of reasons."

"And what reason do you think I have?"

Frank said nothing.

The ensuing silence was meant to draw her out, Cassie knew. Any other day, she would've dug her heels in and made the silence work for her. But just then, with the weight of his attention pressing on her, with the soft skin just under her chin still aware of his fingertips, suddenly all she wanted was to get him away from her, so she thrust the plain truth at him, without wit or finesse: "I've never unplugged or taken it off, except to fuck him. And we’ve only ever fucked in my room, which has its own mic. If I had been choked, you would have heard it."

"Right," Frank said, low. He stood abruptly.

Cassie watched him as he turned and walked away, making out the rigid shape of his shoulders, and thinking with astonishment of how upside-down it all was. This was their way, they set little tests for each other, _come on_ and _keep up,_ and when you were the one who failed the test, you didn't have the right to be pissy about it.

“We talked about this last week,” she said, like an accusation. “I said that Vince clearly loved the idea of getting away with fucking someone else’s woman, you said it was a shame that we packed up my imaginary boyfriend too soon."

"I remember." At the far end of the room, there was the only decent chair in the place, an ergonomic blue swiveling thing that looked like it had been stolen from an actual office. Frank reached out, grabbed its tall back, and began dragging it across the floor back to Cassie. By the time he swung down to sit in it, his shoulders had relaxed.

"Drama queen," Frank said, and there was a little of the old energy to it, some wryness to his mouth.

Cassie, by contrast, felt tired, like she'd just talked her junkie roommate down off a fight. "Pot, kettle," she said, unleavened.

Frank pulled a face, as if to say: _fair enough._ "More trouble than it's worth, this drama," he said. "That's the difference. We don't have a man in place for this, and what happens if Johnstone stops enjoying the cuckoldry and turns plain jealous? We need a better way in."

Cassie was shaking her head before he had finished, impatient to dig in, to clear her mouth and her mind with a clean cold torrent of business.

"We didn't make Lexie for this," she said. "We did our job too well, and now she's the wrong kind of bait. All she's got is looks and youth."

Where Cassie had designed herself like a Swiss army knife, useful and adaptable, she'd designed Lexie like a grenade, meant for only one magnificent explosion that she had hoped would take out a chunk of Johnstone’s operation. Lexie had a good family, a good private-school education, and a bit of international flavor from her diplomat dad. Combine that with good test scores and a longstanding interest in literature, and nobody would second-guess her presence at Trinity, but she wasn’t a genius, because she couldn’t be. She had to be young and free and a certain amount of stupid to fall in with Johnstone’s people without tripping many alarms; a sharp-eyed or quick-witted woman might have registered as a threat. She couldn’t be too interesting, or else people might get interested. But “somewhat useful, mostly harmless” was not the ideal kind of woman to seduce a man like Johnstone. Not for long. Cassie and Frank both knew it. They had simply never thought Lexie could get this far.

“She has charm,” Frank said. “Don’t discount that.”

“It’s not enough." That conclusion felt solid underfoot. Their pattern was coming back, instincts and judgments laid out and analyzed, and it soothed Cassie a little. She went on. "Johnstone’s used to money and power and prostitutes, and there are a hundred other Lexies out every Friday night, ready for a bit of adventure. She can’t suddenly develop a secondary, interesting personality just for him. But he likes winning. He likes getting one over on people, getting away with things. The first time she fucked him, I thought that the hesitancy over her boyfriend was just the cherry on top: _oh, I shouldn’t, but_...and all the other shite. In retrospect, infidelity wasn't extra, it was everything. This third time, just after she broke up with her boyfriend, it was different. He talked less. He liked it, but he only the way he likes having cream in his coffee. Nothing special.”

“But the first two times, there was something special?” Frank dwelled on the last word, mocking, inviting. Bait.

Cassie bit. “Yeah, there was a difference.” Now for her own bait, in a trap she'd made long ago: “Couldn’t you tell?” 

In one of those detached moments when all she had to do was lay back and let Lexie whimper as Johnstone thrust between Lexie’s legs and slobbered at Lexie’s neck, Cassie had wondered if Frank was listening. If Frank was sat at his desk, wearing that cable-knit green jumper and a pair of headphones, staring intently into nothing. At the time, she could picture him so vividly, and she wanted to stop because of it, and she wanted to go on all the louder for it, too.

 _It’s not me,_ she wanted to say to him, _it wouldn’t be like this with me._ The fucking yowling of it, the repulsive pornstar cliché. But she also wanted to make him think of her naked and flushed and spread open pink, body more than another weapon in the arsenal, more than a role played or an order followed, more than a soldier, unmistakably a woman who panted and surged up against you if you touched her just right: _look at me, look at all of me_. She wanted to _make_ him see it.

And now she knew. The split second’s pause while Frank thought about it was answer enough to the real question she had been asking. Implicit in the silence was, _I heard the difference, yeah,_ but he would never say anything as close to _you're right_ as that, the bastard. 

“You’ll have to be careful with this,” was all he said. 

“I will.” 

Both of them knew that if either of them were truly careful, she never would’ve done this in the first place, but that was beside the point.

Frank leaned back in his chair, swiveling from side to side and back again, considering. “Does this new boyfriend of yours have a name, a face, anything?”

“Dominic Hawley, lives in London, travels to Dublin on business, an old crush from when my Dad was posted in London and we did the bar mock trial together. I was totally infatuated, and I never forgot him. Just a couple days ago, he was at a gallery opening to buy a painting for a client, and I was there to swill free booze and procrastinate on my Medieval Lit paper. I saw him and I pounced. He likes it rough, and I’m game to try.” 

"All right.” Frank hauled himself out of the chair. “Let’s start at the start."

Cassie took a sip of coffee to hide a smile. Let the pacing commence.

"Why Dominic?" he said.

She made a lazy gesture with her cup. "Vincent, Francis. I'm surrounded by sinners stealing the names of saints."

"Poetic." Frank grinned. Apparently he wasn’t in the least disturbed at being classed with an international drug dealer. 

And just like that, they were back. 

The next night, Cassie went to Johnstone’s cousin’s birthday party, nominally as the guest of Fran’s girlfriend. After the first five minutes of conversation with Johnstone, she knew that she’d get exactly what she wanted. Afterwards, he traced the bruises on her with the pad on his thumb and pontificated about how a real man didn’t need to bruise a woman, because if he was actually powerful, and if she was actually his, it would require no demonstration. He tended to wax philosophical and grandiose after he'd had sex. Cassie murmured something about trying new things, each to their own, and so on, while she thought with satisfaction that no man had ever given her bruises like that and none ever would. The only part of it that was remotely difficult was striking the perfectly balance when she saw him out the door. _I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it,_ said the expression on her face, shy and ashamed and hungry and wicked all at once. Deep down, though, it was just: _this motherfucker._

Out of Cassie’s three sinners, Vincent didn’t disturb her in the way he should have. She knew better than to underestimate his capability and cruelty, but nothing she felt for the man ran deep or visceral, not even distaste. At a distance, he concerned her in a way that felt vital but logistical, technical, the way a traffic jam would concern someone who needed hospital attention, the way a bishop on a chessboard would concern a player vying for an international championship. Up close, Cassie still felt oddly dispassionate. She knew he had killed in cold blood, and she still viewed Johnstone much as she imagined a farmer would view an untrained horse: she’d break him in eventually, or get thrown, but it was business either way, nothing personal, and Lexie’s business at that. 

Dominic didn’t disturb her, either. She had learned from her mistakes in making Lexie, and built him to be a little more flexible, but solid enough because he was built on a bedrock of other men who acted on the same clichés. Businessman, not half as international as he fancied himself, check. Jet setter, always maybe on his way to town and then cancelling, or showing up at unexpected moments, possibly exaggerating his scheduling troubles in order to jerk her around, check. Just enough of that successful-man magnetism to have young, wide-eyed Lexie still pining after him, check. Cassie could probably spend a few hours in Dublin Airport and find someone exactly like that on any given day. His enjoyment of her bruises were just symbolic sprinkles on top of the cake. They served of physical reminders to Vince that he was, metaphorically, eating stolen pie. And they reminded Cassie that this was all her plan, and the only person she belonged to was herself.

To be perfectly truthful—and Cassie always tried to be, as strange as that was for an undercover detective—Frank was the only part of the situation that could genuinely unsettle her. She had thought she would get over it. She had thought his capability to make her feel actual fear would dissolve once she’d gotten some experience under her belt and come to see him less as a legend and more as a person. But the thing was, she _did_ see him now—and that just made it worse.

She had seen Frank, the genuine article, stripped of mystery. Putting an entire doughnut hole in his mouth, chewing open-mouthed and ugly and distracted. Trampling departmental policies into the dirt by the dozen, flicking glances at her like dares: _yeah? So?_ Marking out a wide bare space in the conversation around the stained bandage on his upper arm, like the wound was a nakedness they both had to pretended not to see, for politeness' sake. Wearing pink unicorn socks for the sake of a kid named Holly who had his wry, curious eyes and his ex-wife’s ash-blond hair—and oh, the way he talked to that kid. The way he looked at her. Frank was so capable of lying, he could lie to himself and not even notice it. He was far from invulnerable.

After learning all of that, Frank shouldn’t be able to strike fear into Cassie, but he was. It had caught her by surprise, in that moment when he squatted down beside her, his eyes catching the right details as his mind spiraled down the wrong track. He was the one who didn’t fucking get it, so why should she be afraid? But she had been. 

Physically it was like the first day all over again, a defiant lift of her chin, but the fear, this time, had nothing to do with career. Cassie knew she couldn’t lose the operation over something as minor as a seduction suggestion. But if Frank had said, _Jesus, Cassie,_ or not even that—a mere flicker of surprise that said that one or both of them did not understand the other—it would have hurt. It had been so long since someone could look at her like that and make it sting, because for almost as long as Cassie could remember, she had never expected to be understood.

As a child, she had managed to shove Lexie down, keep her contained, away from her aunt and the priest and her teachers and her classmates. After a couple years, everybody but Cassie had forgotten about Lexie. Perhaps her aunt remembered, but then her aunt had never understood children, and so had mostly treated Cassie’s upbringing as a series of tasks: food, clothes, education. A kind woman, a loving woman, but no kindred spirit. And even with other people, even in a knot of school friends, Cassie could disappear in plain sight. Dirty jokes and movie popcorn and learning how to put on eyeliner, it was all good fun, and at the end of the day none of them knew her mother’s first name, or that she had once genuinely believed in God, or that she wasn’t afraid of dying and didn’t know why.

She had taken that approach with her to Trinity, and it had bitten her. Hard. It had been her word against the word of a pathological liar, a literal psychopath like something out of her textbooks, and all she had was the truth. David and Goliath, not so much. More like a sixteen wheeler hitting a cyclist. She’d picked up what was left of herself and fled before the term ended, without a degree and without a single new friend to her name. Although she knew the lies and the destruction were the psychopath’s fault, in late bitter moments she forced herself to admit that she hadn’t any right to expect loyalty from people who she had never allowed to see her. 

Throwing herself into the grunt work necessary to get through Templemore had been her best attempt to forget all that. There had been a lot of hearty country boys that she had charmed without trying and ignored without trying, and a handful of girls who mostly didn’t want to be seen all hanging out in one group, which was fine with her. And then street work, cleaning up drunks and directing traffic around accidents and biding her time, ready to grab her chance when it came along.

And Frank had come along.

 _Was that it, then?_ Cassie asked herself, late that night, after she had showered thoroughly and lay, smelling of cherry body wash, silent and open-eyed in the darkness. On the other side of the room, Tilly laughed and gabbed at someone on the phone, which was close enough to being alone. Cassie's thoughts had full rein.

Was it just her ambition manifesting itself when she looked at Frank, knowing that her career was the one good thing she had? It felt worse than that. It felt like something more dire than that. A major mistake. She tried hard to name it for a minute, fists clenched, every part of her straining to figure it out. And then her mind flinched away, and in slid her comforting refrain: _fuck it._

She exhaled long and slow. Yeah, that was it. Fuck it. Her strategy had turned out well, and they were getting on with it, so fuck it. And really, why had she been unsettled in the first place? Some momentary misunderstanding. All in the past now, a place she didn't live. 

Cassie slept soundly that night and woke up hungry the next morning, thinking of nothing more than how badly she wanted a couple of egg and bacon sandwiches and a massive cup of coffee. She ended up scouring the far corners of her roommate’s mini-fridge, discovering an old wedge of cheddar, scraping off the mold, and eating the whole thing in thick slices while she skimmed through “Socrates' Debt to Asclepius: Physicians and Philosophers with Asclepian Souls in Late Antiquity”. By nine, she was in class; by noon, she was hungry again; by nightfall, she’d sold the usual pills to the usual customers, with a special order from Trent Monaghan for his big party Friday night; and by the time she saw Frank again, she’d forgotten all about whatever it was that had been bothering her. 

With the winter holidays came one of the most boring periods of Cassie’s life. Classes were over, Johnstone had taken his family to Spain on a holiday, and Cassie's roommate Tilly had gotten both of them temporarily excommunicated from their shared social circle (and related business) over a series of intricate lies relating to Tilly's drug debts. 

It should have felt like a breather, a chance to relax and take stock, but instead it was as if Cassie had been running fit to beat an Olympic record, and just as she'd rounded the final lap of the track, the whole thing had been called off. She felt stymied, cheated. She found herself taking increasingly long walks, reading entire novels without moving or even looking up between the first and last page, and cooking elaborate fancy messes that she ended up throwing out half the time. Anything to distract herself. She knew if she gave into temptation and poked her nose into certain parties, or texted certain people, that Johnstone would take her impatience for a sign that she didn't trust him to fix things as he'd promised he would. (She didn't trust him, of course, but he didn't need to know that.) All in all, Cassie was so keyed up, she would have welcomed even an essay assignment. That was probably why she hung around Frank's office so often.

Frank, for his part, looked every bit as drained as Cassie was twitchy. The holidays weren't all kicks and giggles for a divorced dad, especially with Holly and her mum off on a trip of their own with Holly's grandma, but that wasn't enough to account for the sheer misery that Frank radiated underneath all the quick lines and glib jokes. Sometimes he no longer even bothered to flash one of his empty grins. Today, he was wearing a russet sweater with a dried smear of mustard on the left sleeve, and it wasn't even dinnertime yet, but he'd already finished both of his afternoon coffees. 

His leadenness grated on her as much as her restlessness grated on him, and yet she found herself hanging around long after their briefing was over. It took a lot to get to Frank, but Cassie knew how to push his buttons. At the moment, she was using an insistent household brattiness, highly effective in slowly ramping up his annoyance, but he still hadn't kicked her out. He was filling out paperwork while she was sitting on the edge of his desk, swinging her legs like a bored kid.

"Weekend plans, Frankie?" she said. That was a touch of his; he tended towards diminutives of people that annoyed him: Tommy boy, our Annie, Billy the Tofu Eater. And she punctuated her question with a _pop._ She had a pack of pink gum (all Lexie's) and she'd spent the whole debrief blowing big obnoxious bubbles of it. It was the gum, more than her words or her presence, that was driving him up the wall. 

"I'll be off Sunday," Frank said. If true, it was noteworthy. Unless he had Holly on a weekend, he usually worked straight through.

Cassie was mid-bubble, so she had to wait a second before could say, "Going to church? You look like you could use it. Pity the priest that hears your confessions, though; he won't be able to sleep for a week."

"He'll regret the vow of celibacy, all right," said Frank, but on automatic, without relish.

"Seducing a priest? That's low, even for you, Frankie." _Pop._

He didn't even look up. "I was pure as the driven snow before I met you, Cassandra. You're the one setting an example."

"Oh, does your ma think I'm a bad influence?" _Pop._

That didn't get an answer, and she didn't think it would, either. Frank would talk for ages about Holly at the slightest provocation—just now, the kid had an obsession with playing the ukelele, so a lot of the trivia related to Holly’s musical accomplishment—but Frank didn't talk about his parents, or his siblings, ever. If he even had siblings.

"I bet your ma would like me," Cassie mused.

Frank's pen was running out. He tested it on his palm, found it completely empty, and threw it at the far wall, where it clattered noisily to the ground. Cassie made an exaggerated moue of surprise and dismay. Sadly, it was lost on Frank, because he was too busy retrieving a fresh pen and pointedly ignoring her.

"Temper, temper," said Cassie. "Maybe it's low blood sugar. Are you hungry? I'm hungry. Do you have some of that trail mix?" Without waiting for a reply, she shoved his swiveling chair over with her foot so she could open up the bottom desk drawer and root around in it.

Frank kept on at his paperwork as doggedly as if it were protest art. But he did say, "If it's wrecking my head you're after, you could just shoot me. It'd be faster."

"Oh, Frankie, I'd never lay a hand on my number one supplier of—" Cassie produced a gallon bag from the drawer, squinted, and scowled. "This is just raisins, you bastard!" She whacked him on the arm and didn't even get an _ow_ in reply. She felt she deserved at least an _ow_. There were only a dozen peanuts left, and not a single piece of chocolate. She was debating whether she should settle for the raisins or go a couple blocks down to get herself a fried chicken sandwich when her phone rang.

_Caller ID: Vince._

She deliberately let it ring a few times before she picked up, and as she waited, her face took on an open, breathlessly expectant, slightly vacant expression. Noticing that, Frank swiveled round to face her.

"Hey, baby," Lexie said.

There was tons of background noise, mostly voices, but some thumping music too. Johnstone was half-shouting to be heard. "How's my girl?"

"Missing you." Lexie didn't simper affectedly—she wasn't that type—but her voice always tasted of a private smile, even across the phone. "Wishing I'd come along. Imagine it: you and me on a beach, me working on my tan. Probably in a bikini."

"Sorry, give me a minute," said Johnstone. There was a bit of rustling, and then the background noise went down significantly. He must be in the bathroom, or a private room. "Okay, better?" 

"Much," said Lexie.

"What was that I heard about a bikini?"

"Three words for you, baby." Lexie counted them off slowly on her fingers. "Pink...strappy...negotiable."

Frank had on a face of mock bliss, and was sliding the end of his pen in and out of his mouth. Cassie rolled her eyes at him.

Johnstone said, "I should buy you a ticket."

Lexie had a wonderful ability to sound as if she was on the verge of laughing, but never laughing. Somehow, men always thought she was just about to laugh at their clever jokes, rather than at them. "You really should,” she said. “Bet you'd taste good with sangria."

Frank moaned, though at least he did it quietly enough that the phone wouldn't catch it. Cassie kicked his shin anyway.

"Sangria? Sweetheart, it's the holidays." There was a note of easy self-satisfaction in Johnstone's voice that made it clear what was going to happen next. "Try champagne."

By the time Lexie finished having phone sex—or rather, by the time Vince had finished—two things had happened. First, Frank had gotten bored and returned to his paperwork, and second, Cassie had hunted down every last peanut in the bag of raisins and eaten them. The whole thing took about six minutes.

"You're an artist, baby," said Frank dryly, without looking up. Emphasis on _baby_.

Cassie waved a hand dismissively. "Sometimes subtlety is useless, and Johnstone likes the crowbar approach."

"Oh, he likes it. That much is clear." Along with the jeer, there was a touch of actual amusement in his voice. Cassie liked it.

"Jealous?" she said.

Frank half-smiled. "Desperately. Wet?"

"Swimming." Something about phone sex with Johnstone was baldly uninteresting. The man was so unimaginative that the whole thing passed by her without even a frisson of hatred for interest's sake. "He says he'll be back in Dublin day after tomorrow, but Sunday morning it's back to Spain and the kids."

"Devoted daddy," said Frank, with a curl of disgust. 

"You're telling me."

Johnstone took about as much interest in his children as he did his microwave, his patio, or any other domestic accessories. Cassie had to try hard not to think about them unless it was from a purely analytical point of view, because otherwise she was gripped by a strong urge to take them and run. Johnstone had, as a corollary of his general policy against hitting women, elaborated against domestic violence in general, but there were at least another dozen ways he could destroy his children, and Cassie had good guesses at a few of them. She had seen pictures, too: the elder daughter a classic beansprout teenager and mostly composed of gangly limbs, the son flat-eyed but goofy with his dad's big ears, the younger daughter fine-featured and far graver than any seven-year-old should be. All of them with their mother's curly hair. It didn't bear thinking about.

"It's got to be a meeting, right?" Cassie said, after a moment. "Something relatively important. Why else would Johnstone come in for only a day?"

Frank thought about it. "I'll shake some trees and see what falls out. There has been some talk about Terrence May expanding his Dublin connections."

Terrence May was an Irish-born Spanish citizen and a key part of the drug pipeline from North Africa to Dublin, on top of which he was suspected of orchestrating several murders, including that of a Dublin madam who had been found in the river after being tortured.

"Exciting," said Cassie, reaching for her phone at the exact same moment that Frank reached for his.

 _hey T what's up_ , she typed.

The reply came immediately: _ugh Jack still being a little bitch about the money_

Lexie had to convince Tilly to be elsewhere at the right time on Saturday without giving away the reason why. Her affair with Johnstone was something of an open secret, but Tilly was not the most observant of girls, and besides, if she knew, she might try to leverage that connection to erase her debts. Cassie could live without that complication. She was pretty sure that she had cleared Tilly out of the room for the whole weekend by complaining of an upset stomach and a low fever—Tilly, despite the drug habit, still drank green smoothies, jogged daily, and was extremely solicitous about her own health—when she sensed Frank watching her. She looked up. Frank wasn’t just watching her, he was full-on staring.

"What are you doing?" he said, after a second.

Cassie hadn't even noticed what she was doing while texting. It had become something of a habit. In retrospect it was a little strange, her mouth on her left wrist, the scrape of teeth and the occasional wet sound of it, but surely Frank was used to stranger.

"Bruises take a while to go from red to purple," she said. "I thought I'd get a head start, so I'm all ripe for him on Saturday."

"Ah." Frank looked very flat, which was his usual reaction to being caught at anything. A general stone-eyed bluff. 

"You want a go?" Cassie offered her wrist to him. It was only a bit red, but there were some clear teeth marks.

"Generous offer, but I think I'll pass," said Frank. He tried to say it dryly, offhanded, but it was already too late. Cassie, restless and preoccupied as she was, had caught it: the tiny movement in his throat in the pause before he'd spoken.

Interesting.

Cassie knew that the crowbar approach wasn't right for Frank. It was almost an insult. But she was so fucking curious—she couldn't be right about this, it didn't make any sense—and she wanted him to know that she'd noticed. So she got up, took a step to the side, and sat squarely in the middle of his desk, arse on paperwork, one knee brushing his. 

"You sure?" she said.

Frank kept his dark eyes on her face, although an entirely different part of her was at his eye level. "Positive."

Her amused curiosity faded into a different expression, intent and faintly predatory. "I could use some hickeys on the neck. That's one thing I can't do myself, it's why I gave Dominic a bit of a thing for choking."

"Better keep it consistent," said Frank, still quite deliberately looking at her face.

"Right," said Cassie.

Frank's phone went _ding_ once, then twice, and then in a steady stream. Presumably his various informants and connections and colleagues were all ready to tell him what they knew or didn’t know about a potential deal between Johnstone and May. Frank didn't look down.

After a long moment, Cassie slid off his desk and unhooked her purse from the back of his chair. "I'm gonna get a sandwich," she said. "Want anything?"

Frank appeared absorbed in his phone. "Nope."

She watched him for a little while, just so he could feel her watching him. She was enjoying this, as much as it puzzled her. How often did she get to see Frank Mackey on the back foot?

"I'm locking the door after you so I can get some actual work done," he said.

"Coward," she said, but when the door closed behind her, she found that she was pleased. Or—not pleased, exactly. Relieved.

Cassie was used to flirting with Frank, and vice versa; it was a habit of theirs, as much as coffee or cigarettes, and she had given it about as much thought. It came naturally, and it meant nothing. But there had been a note in his voice when he said _what are you doing_ that linked with the tiny movement in his throat when she'd presented him with her wrist. She'd given him a chance to defuse it—all he had to do was run his eyes over her with an exaggerated expression of awe, or maybe derision, maybe _are you sure you've got enough to fill out a bikini, Cass_ —and the whole thing would have been over. But he had acted caught. She must have caught him at something. 

She knew her own attractions, not only to Johnstone and the crowbar types, but also to milder men, cleverer ones, kinder ones, all sorts. She had adequate experience for that. But what attraction there was to a woman texting while absentmindedly biting a bruise into her own wrist, and what attraction she could possibly have to _Frank,_ Cassie hadn't the faintest idea. It had been there, undeniably. Why?

Cassie liked thinking of it in this way. Analytically. Detached. As if it were a natural phenomenon, like the seasonal migration of birds, which she could understand and predict by studying patterns and making graphs, something which had nothing to do with her personally. 

What would she say if she had a friend she could talk to? Or no—what advice would she give to a friend who came and told her that this had happened to them? If she was dispensing advice, she would first probably ask if the attraction was mutual.

It was. Frank didn't have looks, muscles, or manners, and Cassie was only about 75% sure he had a soul, but what he lacked, he more than made up for in sheer magnetism. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to work in close proximity to an attractive man; she’d had it far worse before. At Trinity, she had taken an advanced psychology class with a mouthwatering professor, tall and broad-shouldered, with a gentle voice, a habit of running his hand through his tawny hair when he was struggling to find the right words, and the kind of intellect that could have levelled a conference’s worth of other professors, had he been the combative type. Everything the younger Cassie could have asked for. She’d spent many a delightful daydream pushing him up against the whiteboard, threading her fingers in his magnificent hair, licking soft broken sounds out of his mouth, feeling him shudder against her as his long fingers clutched at her waist. Then she’d gotten an A- and never saw him again, both of which were fine by her. She wasn’t ashamed of it in the least.

With Frank, on the other hand, she had never given her imagination an inch. She knew damn well that if they’d met elsewhere, maybe a cop bar, she would have taken him that same night, or at least tried to. She had treated this knowledge much as her aunt had once treated a particularly hated painting that she could not throw away, because it had been gifted to her by her in-laws. She passed by it every day of her life, and she never looked at it or spoke about it. What would be the use? It was a nuisance, but inevitable, so there was no call to fuss over it. That had been Cassie's view of things from day one, and she could be disciplined when she wanted to be. So she hadn’t thought about it for months, except when the occasional observation slipped thorough the cracks: his true laugh was infectious, his fingers were deft. She had promptly discarded each of observation as soon as she’d made it.

Now that she knew Frank felt the same pull, suddenly everything about him felt less dire. Men and their attractions were not always as easy as Vince Johnstone, but they were fairly straightforward, even when difficult. She could handle it. The rare, unprecedented flickers of fear and wanting that Cassie felt around him were perfectly fine if, at the bottom of things, they merely reflected that she and Frank wanted to fuck each other. That was not really a threat. She was surprised by how strong her relief felt.

Saturday came, but Johnstone didn’t. All he sent by way of explanation were a few faintly apologetic texts. He was in the country, business was complicated, and he would come and see her when he could. Lexie didn’t mind the waiting; she found it exciting that, at any moment, the  _ ding  _ of her phone or the sound of the doorknob turning could be a man ready to fuck her. Cassie found it exasperating, not only having to wait, but having to pretend that she enjoyed the waiting. Maybe, she thought, Dominic’s ways were rubbing off on Johnstone. Then she dismissed it. The two of them had never even met, because Dominic didn’t even exist. Come on, Cassie.

On Sunday, she got a short text from Frank at around eight, saying that Johnstone had been spotted eating dinner with Pat Cooney at a restaurant in Cork. At midnight, having gone without a text from Johnstone for the past twenty-nine hours, she gave up and went to go get some ice cream at a late-night student spot. It was a big cup of vanilla ribboned with fudge and and smothered in caramel sauce, so sticky and messy and glorious that afterwards, she licked her fingers and wiped them on her jeans. Then she hopped a fence and had a walk by the beach, shoes dangling from two hooked fingers, toes digging into the wet sand, head tipped back to see what stars the city lights permitted her. 

The vast, insistent sea was like an old friend. Even when she wasn’t looking at it, the endless, sonorous murmuring and sharp, salty smell of it settled her. She liked to feel how small she was beside it, anonymous and untraceable as a grain of sand as the waves erased her footprints after her. The sea was supremely, reliably indifferent; you could meet it with cleverness or stupidity, hatred or love, and it would roll on just as it had for centuries, treating you no different than any of the billions of other people that it touched. There wasn’t any failure in it. There wasn’t anything to understand. There wasn’t anything to lose. It simply existed, and always would, as the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. 

She carried the sea with her as she made her way back into the city, sand in her shoes, salt in her hair, and calm in her chest. 

Frank’s office was a five minute detour. When she saw a thin slice of light peeking out under the crack of the door, she smiled to herself. No surprise there. Holly out of the country, and Frank take a day off? Not likely. 

She hadn’t expected it to be locked, but she had a key.

Inside, the dark green walls gave depth to a velvety darkness. It was the first time Cassie had seen the place with the overheads off, and the single lamp on the desk highlighted everything in gold, as in some long-lost Caravaggio masterpiece: the paperwork, the bottle, Frank himself. Some shadows still slipped dark fingers along the contours of his face and the folds of his suit. He was sitting beside the desk in one of the shitty folding chairs, lifting his glass to her in welcome. There was no outward indication of emotion in his body or on his face; he merely looked very tired. And yet, looking at him, she thought he looked vulnerable. Then she realized why.

The two weeks of unspoken misery before he’d taken Sunday off. Five o’clock shadow instead of the usual scruff. There was about an inch of amber left in the glass, and Cassie recognized the bottle on the table. She’d bought it herself before; it was a good whiskey, rich and faintly smoky. He was more well-dressed than she had ever seen him. The suit fit properly. He had loosened his tie, but not bothered to change. It must have been a horrorshow of a funeral.

Now would be the right time for Cassie to say,  _ just came to grab batteries for the room recorder, _ and get the hell out.

“Were they family?” she said.

Frank took a slow sip, and for a while she thought he would not reply at all.

“No,” he said, finally.

Cassie should shut up now. She knew that much.

“Friend?” she said.

“No,” he said, and unexpectedly, there was a note of perceptible sadness in it. Just a thin streak of something showing above the surface. It could have been mere flotsam, or there could have been an entire iceberg lurking underneath. Either way, Cassie knew something of grief.

He was vulnerable, but not like a defenseless animal. Like a badly wounded one, claws intact. 

It was a long moment, Frank looking at Cassie and Cassie looking back at him, that thin gold thread stretched between them, brittle and shining and ready to snap. 

“Enemy?” Cassie said.

Frank laughed. He laughed as hard and as freely as if she had said something truly funny. From the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, Cassie could see how his face would be etched with crows’ feet in a decade from all the laughter he strewed about so casually, so recklessly. The laughter was as real as the hurt. He would probably be grinning when he died. He was that kind of a man.

Cassie found herself laughing too. At first she was only laughing from the sheer surprise of it, or maybe as a reaction to glass shattered, but by the time they both subsided, his dark eyes were warm and she knew that she wanted to stay.

“Can you spare a drop of that for me?” she said.

“Anything for you, Cassandra.” Frank hooked his foot around the leg of a folding chair, and it screeched at an ear-rending pitch as he dragged it towards her. She took it before he could deafen them both, set it down across from his, and then got a couple takeaway napkins from the stack in the bottom desk drawer, so she could stop the wobbly leg of the chair from driving her crazy otherwise. By the time she sat down, Frank had refilled the glass and was offering it to her. She took it and waited.

There was a mug on Frank’s desk, a new one, painted pink swirled with purple and a sort of white smear right in the middle. There were four spindly white lines coming out of the smear. Cassie tilted her head and looked at it hard as Frank poured a generous measure of whiskey into the mug.

They clinked glasses and drank. It tasted just as Cassie remembered, and after the wind and the sea, the burn in her throat felt good.

After a minute, Cassie said, “Is that a unicorn?”

“How did you know?”

“Expert instincts.” 

In the silence that followed, Cassie couldn’t guess at Frank’s thoughts, and he probably couldn’t guess at hers either, and yet it did not feel solitary. Without touching, without so much as looking at each other, there remained the solid warm feeling of arm pressed against arm.

It occurred to Cassie that they had never done this before, sat across from each other like this. It was always Frank pacing, or Cassie sitting on his desk, or the both of them scrutinizing the far wall of photographs and printouts, or the desk between them. Always there was motion, asymmetry, talk or tension, business or games, and now there was just whiskey. How strange it was to sit with a person and neither want something from them nor want to get away. The thrum of the heater sounded like the sea. The whiskey made her whole body warm.

At some point, she had nothing left in her glass. At some point, she felt him look up and across at her. The way the lamplight hit the side of his face, he looked gaunt and hollowed-out, his left eye lost to shadow. She nearly shivered.

“How did you know to come?” he said. He said it without accusation, without daring. Plainly, except for one note she couldn’t place.

“I didn’t,” Cassie said. Something passed over him, quick as the headlights of a fleeing car, too quick to place. Disappointment, maybe. “The recorder in my room started blinking yellow for low battery, and I thought I’d come get new ones. I had no idea you’d be here.”

“Ah.” Frank nodded once, with a tight little smile. “I’m drunk.” Almost like an apology. 

This time, he looked directly at her in the unfolding silence, unhurried and intent, drinking in her details. Maybe it should have sparked some concern—this unwavering, full-on stare was not the way people looked at each other, it was the way bad liars looked at interrogators, the way currency experts looked at suspected fakes, the way that artists looked at subjects—but Cassie didn’t mind. Maybe that was the whiskey. 

“You smell like the ocean,” he said. She had never heard him speak so quietly before, except for when he was being furtive, and just then, he was the farthest thing from furtive. Again, maybe it was the whiskey, but he was as honest as he was capable of.

“I took a detour,” she said, when what she meant was  _ I would have come sooner.  _

A shrill ringing interjected, some phone alarm. Frank fumbled for it in the pockets of the unfamiliar suit, and then shut it off. “I have a call in four hours,” he said, and then, although she wasn’t going to ask, added: “Time zones.”

Everything aside from Frank was coming back to her now. Her feet were itchy with sand in her shoes, and the folding chair was hard against her shoulder blades, and she found she was exhausted. It was as if the phone alarm had been set as a reminder to her that she had a body. She didn’t want to get up, but she did, and it felt like waking from a thick sleep.

“Better call a cab,” Cassie said. She hadn’t meant to say anything solicitous, but it had just slipped out. 

Frank peeled himself off his chair with a grimace. “I’ll walk.”

There wasn’t anything else left to say, but that still felt unfinished. Cassie turned away and made for the door.

Just as she was reaching for the handle, she heard, “You forgot batteries.”

Frank could hold his liquor and then some. As he crossed the room, there wasn’t so much as a wobble, and then he held out a handful of the silver discs and she held out her hand to take them. The mark on her wrist had gone past the dark red she aimed for, had gone ugly and mottled purple and yellow. She noticed him noticing it.

“Offer still stands,” said Cassie, and blinked. It was as if some other woman had said the words. She hadn’t seen them coming. Frank’s eyes were unreadable, and she was tempted to try and take it back, but then— _ fuck it. _

The same instant she thought that, he took another step forward. This close, and it was hard to miss how much taller he was, how naturally he loomed over her. Slowly, deliberately, he put one hand on the doorframe behind her, and for once in her life, boxed in was exactly where Cassie wanted to be. An unexpected surge of triumph ran through her.

“Make it a good one,” she said.

He lowered his head, and presently his lips were on her neck, just under her jaw. It was not a kiss. He pressed against her openmouthed, tongue and teeth, wet and fierce and exactly what Cassie wanted. She could hear him breathing hard through his nose and she reached up to cup the back of his neck, keep him there, used her other hand to yank at his tie and then he was crowding her against the door, body pressed hers, one thigh shoved up between her legs. She heard herself making some soft, cut-off sound back in her throat, as if from a distance.

Then they both froze. Her phone had gone  _ ding,  _ and it took her a moment to even understand that. With a wet sound, Frank pulled away. He knocked his forehead against her shoulder before he leaned back, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t a drunken accident from the look in his eyes. He was as furious and as desperate as she, but there was a gleam there too, like the whole thing was some undeniable joke. As she fumbled for her phone, Cassie thought that if it was Tilly texting with another drug-fueled existential crisis, she was about to commit manslaughter.

But it wasn’t. It was Johnstone.

_ Sorry about that. I hope you weren’t waiting around for me all day and all night. _

“Oh,  _ fuck _ ,” said Cassie, hard, and angled the phone so Frank could see it as she typed out her reply. 

“Shit,” he said, low.

_ you know I was _

_ tease _

_ when are you gonna come make it up to me? _

The three dots in the grey bubble seemed to bounce endlessly, and in the waiting, guilt came to Cassie acid and clear. If he said he was outside her door, she could think of a dozen different excuses for why she wasn’t there, but none of them were particularly good ones, and the idea that she’d fucked up on the job was unbearable. The answer finally came.

_ Fifteen minutes. _

“Fuck,” she said, but it came as a relief. Her room was a ten-minute walk away.

😋

She shoved her phone into her jeans pocket. 

“You should run,” said Frank. His lips still shone with spit and the knot of his tie was all fucked up. He looked a wreck. He was a wreck, and he didn’t seem to mind.

Cassie reached out and smeared her thumb across his mouth, as if that could erase anything, as if that could help. Her neck was still wet and so was her cunt and if she was being completely honest, she hoped that this was exactly as irretrievable as it felt.

She looked away from him and felt it like a click. Then there was only the door handle and the narrow hall and the echoing staircase and double doors to night air laced with wind and cold, and Cassie had no time to analyze what she had done. She ran.


End file.
